The Horses of St. Mark's

by Charles Freeman

  An audience hall could hold only a limited number and an emperor like Constantine, who had total confidence in himself, needed a larger arena in which to display himself in front of his subjects. The best such setting a large Roman city could provide was its hippodrome, the circuit for chariot racing. The most impressive of these, and the one which provided a model for others in the empire, was the Circus Maximus in Rome, which ran along the southern edge of the Palatine Hill. The site is completely deserted today, just an open space in the shape of an oval, and it is hard to recreate any sense of what it was like in its heyday; but by the time it was finally completed, around AD 105 in the reign of the emperor Trajan, it was over 600 metres long and 140 metres wide with a capacity of 150,000 spectators – three times the number who could fit into the nearby Colosseum.

  When the emperor was in residence in the imperial palace on the Palatine Hill he would preside over the races from an imperial box set in the side of the hill, and even if not there himself he would use the games as a means of sustaining his popularity. His chief responsibility lay in providing the horses. In a typical day’s racing there would be twenty-four races and, with four horses to each of twelve chariots (four teams of three), each race would need forty-eight horses, over 1,150 in total. The demand for horses was so heavy, in fact, that whole herds of wild horses were set aside to help the emperors to meet it. Yet there was much more than this to the chariot-racing spectaculars. Along with the games in the great amphitheatre of the Colosseum,* they constituted the only occasion when an emperor could see and be seen by his subjects en masse – and they were not going to miss the opportunity to let him know their feelings. ‘The Romans gather enthusiastically in the circus,’ wrote the historian Josephus in the first century AD, ‘and there the assembled throngs make requests of the emperors according to their own pleasure. Emperors who rule that such petitions are to be granted automatically are highly popular.’ Josephus goes on to describe the response of the emperor Caligula (emperor AD 37–41), who sent his men among the crowds to arrest, and put to death, anyone who shouted for favours. Not surprisingly Caligula was himself murdered a few weeks later (although his behaviour in the Circus was only one of his crimes against the people that drove the conspirators to assassination). If emperors did not grant a request they were at least asked to produce a reason for the refusal. On one occasion the crowd demanded of the emperor Hadrian (r. AD 117–38) that a victorious charioteer who happened to be a slave be given his freedom. Hadrian refused with the modest explanation that he had no power to give away the property of another. Any refusal had to be given directly by the emperor himself; the crowd considered it insulting if a message was relayed to them by a herald.

  The more confident emperors knew how to use the opportunity offered by a clearly defined area, the imperial box, which was set off from the crowds and above them, giving everyone a clear view of the emperor in his glory. Augustus, who had a highly sophisticated approach to crowd management, once countered a protest against new laws encouraging the equestrian class to marry by appearing in the box overlooking the Circus Maximus with a collection of children assembled from his extended family to make the point that marriage had its purposes. Constantine showed the same confidence in his use of the hippodrome. Wherever he made his capital he enlarged the existing hippodrome or built a new one, and in every case it ran alongside his palace with the imperial box as a display area between the two. In 310, at the beginning of his career, when he was in control only of northern Europe and based at the provincial imperial capital of Trier, he had built a hippodrome next to his palace. When he arrived in Rome in 312, after his great victory at the Milvian Bridge, he found that Maxentius, whom he had defeated, had constructed a massive hippodrome to the south of the city (whose ruins can still be seen). Constantine retaliated by showering patronage on the Circus Maximus. It is reported that it was ‘wonderfully decorated’ by him, with a new portico and golden columns and statuary. An extended seating area from this date has been uncovered in excavations. Between 317 and 323 Constantine was campaigning in the Balkans and based at Sirmium, another provincial capital, and here again he seems to have completed a hippodrome.

  The new hippodrome in Constantinople, then, was bound to be something special. It was modelled on the Circus Maximus in Rome to make the point that this was a ‘new Rome’, and Constantine decorated the barrier (the spina) which ran between the turning posts with a mass of statues. The hippodrome was about two-thirds the size of the Circus Maximus, but this was in a city which had, as yet, only a fraction of Rome’s population. The fourth-century Christian scholar Jerome tells of whole cities being stripped of their treasures to decorate it and the other open spaces in the city. Among the treasures known to have been taken by Constantine for this purpose were the column commemorating the Greek victory over the Persians in 479 BC, from the oracle site of Delphi (the base still remains today, where it was embedded in the spina), and statues of Apollo (one of which may also have been taken from Delphi) and of the Muses (from Mount Helicon in Boeotia). From Actium, in north-western Greece, came another victory monument, that set up by Augustus to commemorate his defeat of Mark Antony there in 31 BC. One motive for building Constantinople was to celebrate Constantine’s victory over a rival, Licinius, who had ruled the eastern part of the empire, so bringing in an earlier victory monument put up by a westerner to show off his own defeat of a rival was highly appropriate.

  The remains of the Hippodrome in Constantinople c.1600. Note the obelisk, an Egyptian symbol of the sun, which was a common feature of hippodrome decoration. The obelisk and the other monuments were placed along the spina, the barrier around which the chariots raced. (Mary Evans Picture Library)

  To add to the aura of the hippodrome a massive statue of Hercules was transported all the way from the Capitoline Hill in Rome. Hercules was often associated with chariot racing because he was believed to have shown the same combination of physical strength and cunning in achieving his labours as was needed by a charioteer. At the Circus Maximus a statue of Hercules Invictus, Hercules the Unconquered, stood near the starting gates, and this part of the Circus was believed to be under his special protection. The Hercules brought to Constantinople was of great aesthetic and symbolic importance as it was said to have been made by Alexander the Great’s favourite sculptor, Lysippus. The Romans had looted it from the Greek city of Tarentum in southern Italy in 209 BC and transferred it to the Capitoline Hill in Rome as a reminder of their humiliation of the city.

  If one is trying to distinguish a hippodrome from the other monuments one finds depicted on a Roman coin, one clue to look for is an obelisk, a needle-shaped stone monument. Obelisks originated in ancient Egypt as a symbol of the sun, and they were derived from a stone called the benben that was placed in the main temple to the Egyptian sun cult at Heliopolis at the southern end of the Nile delta. Augustus, who had conquered Egypt for the Roman empire, brought back an obelisk from Heliopolis and in 10 BC he had it placed on the barrier in the Circus Maximus, adding to it his own dedicatory inscription to the sun.* In doing this he was honouring ancient traditions which linked the sun to chariot racing. The story goes that the word circus itself was derived from the name of Circe, the daughter of Helios the sun-god (Sol to the Romans), who had established the first chariot races in his honour. In the Circus Maximus there was an ancient temple to Sol near the finishing line.

  The obelisk features prominently in a much later account by a court official, one Corippus, which describes the rituals surrounding the accession of a Byzantine emperor, Justin II, in AD 565 in Constantinople. These included a presentation of the new emperor to the people in the hippodrome. Corippus breaks off his narrative to explain why the circus and the sun were so closely linked.

  The Senate of old [in Rome] sanctioned the spectacles of the new circus in honour of the New Year’s sun and they believed that by some ordering of the world there were four horses of the sun, which were symbols of the four seasons in the recurr
ing years. Thus the senators of old laid down that there should be in the likeness of the seasons as many charioteers and as many colours [the four teams in any Roman chariot race were known by their colours, Blue, Green, Red and White] and they created two opposing parties, just as the coldness of winter strives against the warmth of summer.

  Corippus goes on to explain that a circus itself is designed to represent a whole year divided into seasons. The four equinoxes are represented by the turning posts at either end, the centrally placed obelisk and the ‘eggs’, a set of egg-shaped marbles which stood close together in a frame halfway along the barrier and were removed one by one as each lap was covered.* In other words, there were four distinct and equal stretches of the circuit, two either side of the spina. Corippus’ account has found support in the rare survival of a glass bowl, dating from the middle of the fourth century and probably made in Cologne, where it was found in 1910. It has a central medallion with a bust of Sol in it around which four chariots parade. They are divided from each other by emblems of the circus: an obelisk, a set of ‘eggs’ and the two turning posts.

  After Augustus it became the custom for every circus to have its own obelisk, although in Constantinople the earliest one of which we have direct evidence was placed there by the emperor Theodosius I in AD 390 in celebration of peace treaties with the empire’s enemies, the Goths and the Persians. A second was set up early in the following century. Yet even if we know of no obelisk placed in the hippodrome by Constantine, his own close association with the sun was embedded in ceremonies in the hippodrome, as could be seen in the official inauguration of the city in May 330. The day’s events began in the presence of the emperor with the lifting of a great gold statue of him, which had been fashioned from an ancient statue of the sun-god, on to a column (which still stands, in a much battered form, today). Dressed in magnificent robes and wearing a diadem encrusted in jewels, Constantine himself then processed to the imperial box which overlooked the hippodrome. Among the events which followed one stood out: the arrival of a golden chariot carrying a gilded statue of the emperor, again shown as a sun-god, which in turn held a smaller figure of Tyche, the goddess of good fortune. For the next two hundred years the ritual drawing of the statue and chariot through the hippodrome was to be re-enacted on the anniversary of the dedication.

  This engraving of 1806 shows a Roman mosaic of a chariot race discovered at Lyon in France. Note the starting gates on the left and, inside the spina, the obelisk and the rows of ‘eggs’, one of which was removed after each lap. (Musée de la Civilisation Gallo-Romaine, Lyon, France/Bridgeman Art Library)

  Between anniversaries Constantine’s chariot and its statue were placed at the Milion, a grand imperial building in the shape of a gilded canopy with four arches, which stood outside the hippodrome, but close to its starting gates, where the ceremonial processional route into the city, the Mese, ended. Beside it stood a team of four horses.

  Memories of Constantine’s inauguration lingered long in the city. In an eighth-century chronicle of Constantinople’s monuments, the Parastaseis Syntomoi Chronikai (literally, ‘Brief Historical Notes’), we read that

  At the golden Milion a chariot of Zeus Helios [Zeus in the guise of the sun-god] with four fiery horses driven headlong beside two statues has existed since ancient times … And the chariot of Helios was brought down into the Hippodrome, and a new little statue of the Tyche of the city was escorted in the procession carried by Helios. Escorted by many officials, it came to the Stama [the place where the victorious charioteers received their palms of victory] and received prizes from the emperor Constantine, and being crowned it went out and was placed in the Senate until the next birthday of the city.

  In the same chronicle the writers, who are assumed to be court officials, describe ‘a statue of a woman and an altar with a small calf’ in the hippodrome itself. ‘With these too were four horses shining with gold and a chariot with a charioteer [possibly Tyche?] holding in her right hand a small figure, a running image.’ Victory was often personified as a running woman, but this statuette could also have been of an athlete; female charioteers were rare. ‘Some say’, they go on, ‘that the group was erected by Constantine while others say merely the group of horses, while the rest is antique and not made by Constantine.’ This statue too appears to have been hauled in its chariot in procession through the hippodrome by the citizens of Constantinople, who, the chronicle records, were dressed in white mantles and carried candles, on each anniversary of the city’s foundation. One assumes that ‘the four horses shining with gold’ remained at their base to be rejoined by the chariots when the ceremony was over.

  Later, a century after Constantine, another team of four horses was set up as a permanent feature in the hippodrome, over the starting gates where, according to one observer, they still stood in the twelfth century. These horses were said to have been brought by the emperor Theodosius II from the Greek island of Chios, close to the coast of Asia Minor, in the early fifth century. Chios was a prosperous place, its inhabitants – according to the historian Thucydides, writing in the fifth century BC – among the most wealthy of all the Greeks. Its trading networks stretched from the Black Sea to Egypt and as far east as southern Russia, while at home its population was sustained by a fertile plain on the east coast. Unlike much of mainland Greece, Chios would certainly have had the pasture and wealth to support horses, and it is possible that the hippodrome horses, if they came from there, were commissioned by a victor in the Greek games (which will be described in the next chapter).

  So we know of at least three teams of four horses in Constantinople in the century after its foundation. Of the two whose chariots were paraded in the hippodrome, either or both could have been made by Constantine or brought by him from another site. There is also another possibility: that Constantine found one or more teams of horses already in place in Byzantium when he arrived to transform the city. The historian Dio Cassius (AD 164–after 229) recorded, for instance, that when the emperor Septimius Severus besieged Byzantium in the 190s ‘the stones of the theatres, the bronze horses and the bronze human figures’ were hurled at him as ammunition. It has been argued that Septimius Severus might have recreated the horses to atone for their sacrilegious destruction and that these would have been found by Constantine when he rebuilt the city. On the other hand, Septimius Severus, whose regime depended on continuous celebration of military triumph, may well have commissioned a triumphal quadriga on his own account to celebrate his taking of Byzantium when he rebuilt the shattered city. If Constantine had found a quadriga in the city he may well have chosen to preserve it as a fitting symbol of his own success.

  Whatever their origins, it is likely that one of the three teams mentioned in the Parastaseis Syntomoi Chronikai is the set of gilded horses described by Bernardo Giustiniani in Venice in the passage quoted on p. xv and said by him to have originally belonged to ‘the chariot of the sun’ and to have been ‘brought from Constantinople’. But before we explore further, we need to understand why horses came in teams of four.

  3

  HORSES AND HEROES

  IF ONE MOVES WESTWARDS BY SEA FROM CONSTANTINOPLE, out through the Hellespont into the Aegean and then southwards to Greece, one hits landfall on the long coastline of the island of Euboea. The sensible sailor heads inland around Cape Artemisium on the north-eastern coast, so as to reach the sheltered waters between Euboea and the mainland. (A large part of the Persian invasion fleet of 480 BC was lost, driven onshore by a gale, when it tried to edge round the island on the outside.) There had long been trading links between Euboea and the civilizations of the east, but in 1100 BC at the onset of the so-called Dark Age these contacts had been disrupted by what appears to have been an economic collapse followed by widespread conflict. Until recently early Greek history was believed to be almost uneventful between that date and the revival of trade and confidence in the eighth century which marked the end of the Dark Age.

  Then in 1981 a remarkab
le discovery was made at Lefkandi, a site between Chalcis and Eretria on the inner coast of Euboea. Archaeologists found a great hall, some 45 metres long and 10 metres wide, dating from 1000 BC. It was unlike anything known from earlier times. Its mud walls had been built on stone foundations, and around them was a colonnade of wooden posts. More remarkable still, there was a burial within the walls: of a man, who had been cremated, and a woman, along with an array of goods more extensive than anything that could be expected for the time. There were a spear and a sword in iron, an engraved bronze vessel and, with the woman, gilt hair coils and gold discs which had been laid on her breasts. All this suggested a couple of high status who had the power to organize a large and skilled labour force and who also had access to the goods of the east. But their community seems to have lost its vigour. The archaeological evidence suggests that part of the building at least collapsed soon after the burial, and it appears to have been another century before Lefkandi resumed contact with the east.